


fall

by redundant



Series: And beat them backward home. [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Castiel (Supernatural) Character Study, M/M, Pining Castiel, casual blasphemy, for most of it except the end, sorry @ jesus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 18:48:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16352177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redundant/pseuds/redundant
Summary: Light binds to light. The Sword becomes whole.Castiel leaves a handprint on his shoulder..basically: castiel falls. this is sort of how.





	fall

It is dark. Castiel is under a mud roof, leaning over a girl. The girl’s breaths come slowly; so do Castiel’s, out of human lungs. He’s an old woman now. His hair is grey, skin wrinkled. A rare sight in this era and place. Gabriel hovers outside, arms crossed, in the body of a young man so as not to attract attention.

He’s not attracting any attention from Castiel. He steps forward quietly, careful not to wake the girl’s husband. He places a hand on the girl’s belly, and closes his eyes.

Space folds and unfolds, and when he opens his eyes, he can see the girl’s womb and the zygote adhered to its wall.

Already the cells have begun to cleave. One into two into four into more. They have so much potential: they are nothing, are yet to be shaped into the components of tissues and organs. Which ones speak heart? Which ones speak liver, or brain, or lungs? All sit in the dark, warm room. They wait for shapes and names. They wait to know.

He leans closer to the cells and touches them. Though they have nothing even close to resembling a body or a circulatory system, he imagines a ticking pulse, the ebb and wane of life-blood, light. Something breathing. It hits him: this ball of cells will _breathe_. Castiel is immortal, but this never fails to strike him- life, the way it starts, the way this thing will grow. It will take its first steps and stumble over dry, cracked earth. It will grow and learn to work with wood. It will learn people. It will be nailed to a tree by other humans but it will still love them, fierce in its gentleness; this will be a love that shakes the world, one that ripples out from Bethlehem and leaves its fingerprints. That love will be passed from book to book, hand to hand. Its body and blood will touch the lips of billions.

But the love will be corrupted, its message distorted. There will be hatred. Genocide. Rape. Atrocities beyond belief. Atrocities stemming from belief. Unspeakable things, things that, like the cells, are not yet named, but known. The All-Father knows, because He created the All. Even still, it’s daunting to look at the cells and see the path they will tread all laid out.

“Castiel,” Gabriel hisses through the window. “Hurry up.”

Castiel removes his hand, and looks at the cells and the womb and the girl. He prays to his Father that His Plan is sure.

The air outside is cold. They leave their bodies crumpled behind a stable, and vanish into the stars.

  


Christ dies. Other things happen too, in this world of millions of people, most of whom have never heard of Jesus and whose descendants also won’t. Not for a while, at least. Colonisation is yet to come.

Castiel, in the meantime, is a good soldier. Damn good, actually. When he’s down on Earth, he appears as a thunderbolt, a wildfire; people bow to him and offer things with shaking hands. He blazes without mercy. He razes without fear. It’s all quite Old Testament, which is nice, thematically appropriate, and doesn’t leave any room for the doubt. He burns it out as he burns villages to the ground. Heavenly wrath shines out of his every pore. He polishes his armour with it, keeps it tucked close under his wings as he stands sentinel on cold, blustery nights, the ones when he can’t see the stars, the clouds are so thick.

His faith is strong, and keeps his shoulders straight when he is commended by Uriel, by Naomi, and rises through the ranks to commander. But it is built on soil in which doubt is taking seed.

There is confusion on the Earth. Different calendars, different timelines, so much tangled thread. Castiel can see so, so much more of it than the humans can, but it’s still a lot. It’s still chaotic. He can hear it like music, read it like words, but the notes, every so often, are discordant, jarring; the words run on in too-long sentences that swallow their own tails and then are cut short.

Castiel looks at it all from time to time and wonders, for a moment, if Father thought all of this through.

And then something will inevitably happen that brings all the tangled threads together. Somebody will fall in love. Somebody will die. It is in these moments that Castiel remembers God’s Will is unquestionable, His Plan undeniable, and so will return to the ranks humbled and chagrined.

  


“So much of it depends on chance,” says Anael. Her light is dimmer than usual, her wings drawn close.

Naomi is running drills for the foot-soldiers some way behind them, putting them through their paces. Castiel has been exempted, as a commander. Besides, he’s only just returned to Heaven. It is late again, if that is possible here. His posting means he has spent too much time on Earth, and it has left its fingerprints in him: its dependency on time, earliness and lateness and three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Did Naomi speak to you again?” Castiel says, dry.

Anael glares. “That isn’t the point.”

She’s a good soldier, too. He hasn’t seen much of her, lately: Heaven is too full of names he has to memorise

“Yeah, no, I get you,” Gabriel says from his perch nearby. Space bends and he shimmers into view next to them. Entirely unnecessary: he could have just flown, but that’s Gabriel. “It’s like, why him?”

“It’s not Oppenhei-” Anael begins.

“For I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” Gabriel mocks, his voice high-pitched and squeaky. It drops again into his normal register. “Someone thinks he’s special.”

“He created the potential end to all civilisation,” Castiel points out, choosing to ignore the blasphemy. Privately, he thinks it’s warranted, given the situation.

“So did Shiva. And Shiva’s not a dick about it.”

“Shiva said it first,” Anael says.

“Doesn’t count.”

“You’re more of a dick than he is.”

It’s true.

“Well, yeah,” Gabriel reasons, “but with me it’s justified.”

“See?” says Anael. “Dick.”

Castiel hides a smile.

Gabriel seems to catch it, though. He scowls. Space bends again, and when it unwarps, he is gone.

A few seconds pass. Maybe it’s longer, down on Earth. They are unaffected by the movement of the star Sol; to angels, up here, the stars leave trails behind them. Sunspots. Traces of where they once were. The passage of time is laid out in the heavens, in ribbons of light. But if Castiel focuses on Earth, the movement stops: the stars become pinpricks, Sol burns in front of them, space becomes dark and vast, and he can see a bright flash over a vaguely whale-shaped island. Castiel wonders if Anael is looking at it, too.

When Gabriel returns, he does it quietly. It’s unlike him. “He’s a cog.”

Anael sighs, and tears her gaze away from the planet. “Still stuck on Oppenheimer?”

“He’s bigger than average in Father’s Plan, sure, but still tiny. Still used.”

Castiel risks a look over at Gabriel, and finds him scowling. It’s not unlike him to be brooding and/or miserable, especially when he’s back up from Earth and the rush of returning to a celestial body has worn off. But this is uncharacteristically cynical of him, especially with Uriel and Naomi so close.

“You’d be wise to watch your words,” he warns.

Gabriel shifts to look at him, incredulous. “You sound like them,” he says. “You know that? Can you hear yourself?”

Castiel looks at him and feels- something. Something decidedly human, from his days in a body. If he had a chest, there would be a hole in it. If he had feet, the ground underneath would be unsteady. “Father has a Plan.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Gabriel,” Anael says firmly, cutting him off. Castiel turns to her, grateful for the distraction. “I misspoke, and I apologise. Father has a Plan, and we are all part of it.”

“This confusion,” Castiel says. “The anger, the _why him_. It’s all part of it.”

Disbelieving silence. He hesitates.

“I’m sure of it,” he adds.

Gabriel takes one long look at the both of them. Castiel thinks he is about to leave- something about his wings, poised to move- when he sighs theatrically (and unnecessarily, they don’t have lungs) and sits, and stays.

The drills run on in the background. Time yawns.

Castiel doesn’t know it just yet, but all three of them are infidels.

  


And how.

Gabriel falls with gusto, taking the form of a human and spitting on Heaven’s door on his way down. He raises his middle fingers at the ranks of Heaven. He pisses on the Pearly Gates. Lucifer would have been delighted.

But Hell is not for Gabriel, oh no. It’s the human world that he loves. Pornography and television and the screeching of traffic jams; candy, cocaine, sugar rush. Lust and greed and gluttony and the other four, sure, but that’s not where the appeal lies. It’s all those bright, shiny colours after an eternity of colourlessness. It’s taste and touch and smell. The pleasures of the human body are varied and endless- Castiel has been around long enough to see most of them from Heaven, peeping through the clouds. Detached. Removed. Watching them eat and drink and fuck and steal, wondering if it was worth the fall.

It’s understandable, how the humans live in sin, but regrettable. Understandable, how Gabriel fell, and regrettable. But Castiel soldiers on.

Anael falls for the _humanity_ of them, or so she insists. The other angels refuse to hear it. She fucked Dean Winchester and that is that. Sex with a human = a potential seraphim = please close the door on your way out. No matter that she wasn’t technically an angel then.

Castiel doesn’t ask her, but he wonders if they used a condom. He wonders if that would make any difference. He suspects it wouldn’t, as she Fell deliberately. She wanted to feel as humans did (strike one) and so she ripped out her grace (strike two) and was born into a human family, and when she discovered she was an angel (and here the jury holds their breath) she didn’t want to go back (and here they exhale; strike three).

Heaven is a flurry, a chicken coop of disapproval. Amongst it all- the tutting, the disapproving faces, the brief stint where she is tortured back into following the Good Word- Castiel sits carved from marble. He does his duty. He doesn’t think, and so does not bother to point out, that if it happened, so it must be God’s Will; he wouldn’t want the trouble. He wonders about condoms and the logistics of it, as that is natural curiosity pertaining to Anael’s trial. He doesn’t wonder if the sex was good. How it would have felt, to know you were once an angel, to remember what the loss of grace felt like, and to still want so fiercely and regret so little. He doesn’t wonder what two bodies feel like in that kind of union. What it is to touch, to feel, to hold. If it is less lonely than faith, or more.

  


The point of all of this: Castiel falls, too.

  


It could be argued that Castiel falls slower, more thoughtfully, with parachute silk billowing out behind him.

It could also be argued that it happened quickly. The first step out of the plane and into the atmosphere.

Truth be told, he doesn’t remember, exactly.

Nothing but sky and clouds and the ground growing larger under him, and the sick dread, the thrill.

  


If it happened quickly, this is what it would be.

A hand into Hell.

Wings strained, muscles taut. He pulls the cracked and bleeding soul out the chasm.

He mends it. Binds light to light. Music flows over the wounds: Dean’s soul shrieks. Castiel carries on. Creation was a song, and this is a repeat performance- admittedly much smaller, but still. His grace sings sweet as a sword.

He holds the bruised, keening thing cupped in his palms, and coaxes the light out. Makes it atoms, gives those atoms form. Structure. Cells find their languages, here in the space between his hands. They split. They split again: divided, multiplying. He shapes it like clay, knits muscle and bone and blood into being.

Darkness, warmth. Hell grows quiet around them. Or maybe it’s not that the fire grows dim, but that Castiel’s light is such that everything shrinks away. A star burning in space, directed through a needle’s eye. This fierce, terrible concentration: it feels righteous. It feels good.

The act of salvation- _you are saved_ \- is an act of compliance with Michael’s orders. But this, the act of creation, feels dangerously like defiance.

But how, one part of him argues after the fact, can this be wrong? Giving salvation, absolution, a second chance: it is righteous. It is good.

Right now, though. Here in Hell.

A star burning in space, directed through a needle’s eye. This fierce, terrible concentration: it feels righteous. It feels good.

Light binds to light. The Sword becomes whole.

Castiel leaves a handprint on his shoulder.

  


Time passes. More things happen. They overlap, now, in a way that they didn’t before, when he was in and of Heaven. The sun moves differently when he’s on the ground.

He gets to know Dean beyond what his blueprints are. He’s surprised by his foul mouth and disrespect for anything with a halo. This is the Sword? But he swallows his doubt and accepts the Plan.

His fascination with Dean’s mouth grows. He finds himself observing it more. He finds himself beating the shit out of Dean in an alley somewhere. He finds himself looking at his hands- skin untorn and whole, but splattered with red. He finds himself watching Dean laugh till he cries, outside a brothel, not understanding why, and observing the mix of shame and pride that wells up in him: shame for not knowing what is happening, pride at making Dean forget, for a moment, the weight he carries.

He makes his body back. Technically speaking, it is Jimmy Novak’s, and he is surprised, not unpleasantly so, to think of it as his own.

They have saved the world once, will save it again. More time passes. Even more things happen. People to save, things to hunt. He has gone from thing to people in Dean’s eyes, somewhere along the way.

Sometimes he misses Heaven. Sometimes he doesn’t. At first, he tries not to think about why.

The Plan grows more clouded to him every day, sediment stirred by turbulent waters. Questions rise in him, too many to be ignored, but he swallows them down, stores the resultant doubt in his tissues as his body stores glycogen.

Things continue to happen. Castiel drags himself deeper into the quagmire of the fallen, or whatever it is they’re calling it in Heaven. Already, there is distance between them. He’s far too angel to be human, but not quite angel enough to be welcomed back with open arms.

God is dead, or missing, so Castiel steps in. He is merciful, kind; he eats monsters and likes the way they burn in his gut. He loves and he terrifies in turn, and all the while the Leviathan claw at him from the inside, turning him into a ragged, bloodied, nervy mess. He snaps. He screams. His grace is dying. Creation is destroying him. He is not God.

He goes to Purgatory. He comes back.

And then there’s a lull.

  


There’s just more of him each time he returns. And it hurts a little more, each time; more of him to manage, less to be sure about. Like having planets added into his orbit. His gravitational field just can’t manage it. He wonders when his sun is going to collapse, if it hasn’t already.

A small part of him still believes in the Plan. A larger part wonders, if such a Plan exists, why this is happening to him. An even larger part knows, with a cold, dead finality, that it is what he deserves; not only did he stray from the flock, he was delusional enough to believe himself its rightful shepherd. He wanted teeth and he tried to use them.

He has changed. The sun- not Sol anymore- moves differently. The stars do, too. Time is no longer fluid and beautiful, but measured by clocks. He blinks, and things change. He tries to keep track of all of it, but really, there’s only so much he can do. Everything is always moving, and nothing has the decency to remind him of where it once was, like the stars once did.

There is one exception.

  


Well.

This is not strictly true.

It is moving, he just- is aware of it, more often than most things, if that makes sense.

At first, he doesn’t know what it is. Can’t see it, the way you can’t really see a hole, or the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It’s a physical thing. Beats right in the center of his chest.

It comes up whenever he thinks about Dean. So Castiel narrows his eyes and looks hard at the curve of Dean’s mouth, the clear green light of his eyes, the cluster of blackheads and freckles on his nose, and tries to figure out what part of him is causing this.

He’s not an idiot. He has his suspicions as to what this is. He does wonder, though, in the Impala one Valentine’s Day, as he shovels sliders into his mouth, if this emptiness is what the humans call- well. Doesn’t want to use the word, even in retrospect. It all feels a bit lacking, a bit melodramatic. This is what they fell for?

But it changes.

He finds it in the small moments. Outside motel rooms, wiping grit from sleepy eyes against the sunrise; hauling duffel bags into the back of the Impala; driving, following long, straight lines of dusty road against rustling wheat fields stretched with fingers far too close to the horizon. Breakfast and lunch and dinner. Hunts. Morgues. Police stations. Someone at his side, or someone on the other side of the phone. Hands pushing a mixtape into the deck or a cup of coffee across the kitchen counter, carefully stitching skin and torn cloth, steady on his shoulder. Even after Dean kicks him out of the bunker, he feels it. Even when he’s cramped in the supply closet of a Gas N Sip, after closing up, he feels it. Even when he comes back, sees Dean’s averted eyes, hears the hesitation that hangs between them, he feels it. It feels like faith used to. He feels it the way he used to feel the Plan, in the beginning, woven into the fabric of the world around him, a single golden thread. He holds on to it, through all the shit that moves and changes. It doesn’t make everything perfect- far from it, in fact- but it’s a solid, holdable thing.

Something is growing out of the empty space. Maybe it’s always been there. Maybe not. It’s fresh and bright and strong, and it has roots in good, dark soil. And it feels sort of like the trees do, when he talks to them, and it feels like the ocean does, too. And it feels like the stars, and it feels human. It’s a small thing. The biggest thing there is. It holds true, like a needle hovering dead north.

Maybe there’s a name for this.

  


And maybe there’s not.

It’s dark. Castiel’s under a bare, unlit bulb they haven’t come around to replacing, eyes trying and failing to focus on Dean.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says, voice low. The shadows hide him. “You- God. I-”

“Is it the-”

“No. No, shut up, I’m doing this.” He shoves something into Castiel’s slack arms. A bag.

“Dean.” Half a question. “What’s going on?”

“Cas.” First time his name’s been spoken the entire conversation; it hangs there, broken off by a sharp breath. “I’m sorry.”

“Dean, what’s going on?” Castiel asks, already drawing up contingency plans- for the Mark, if it’s acting up, and how to get Sam down into the basement so they can sort this out. His eyes are growing used to the dark. There is something on the patch of wall next to Dean’s shoulder. A sigil.

Something presses into Castiel’s hand. Smooth, square, soft.

Dean raises his hand-

(Castiel realises what is happening, too late-)

and slams it to the wall.

something

bright,

blinding,

and then not much of anything at all.

**Author's Note:**

> first part of a (maybe) series, depending on interest!  
> this was completely unbeta'd, so if you spot any mistakes, please do let me know.


End file.
